I love Santa Claus, and the entire concept of raising a Christmas tree (a task I personally would find a little difficult to undertake), and, of course, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, though  he for all purposes couldn’t have come out of Kaziranga, given the weather differences. And yes the tooth fairy I read about in books growing up in Shillong, going to school in Edmund’s, a coveted hall of education then.

But I also love the Oxomiya tradition of getting two frogs married to appease the rain gods, should the state go through a dry spell. Just in the way I remember as a child growing up in the Oxom of those days, throwing my milk teeth on the roof chanting “Nigoni o nigoni, tor daat mok de, mor dat toi lo…”, the practice of kids asking mice for their teeth in exchange for the ones they’ve lost. A rather practical barter I think now, given the strength those little creatures seem to have in their teeth as compared to those we carry, especially as children!

So long as a tradition is fun and does not hurt anyone, isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t traditions and festivals what keep us going in an otherwise dreary world? Don’t they make us who we are, no matter where we are in the world? Along with our languages and religion–or atheism–the identity we have?  

And yet many of those who are busy celebrating the ‘holiday season’ and the English New Year–and English it is–will soon, as Oxom enters the dry season some months from now, be out on the streets slamming fun traditions that we have as a community and as a country (like getting frogs married) and criticise our colours and sounds and languages, people who when it comes to the fun part of our civilisation will talk science and logic, even as they now party in their Santa caps, doing a ‘Ho ho ho’!

Brings me to the question of some people pulling the secular card on those who are angry that a heroine’s attire in a certain film had to be coloured saffron. Question is: why do it? Why use a color that someone else holds sacred in a manner that may hurt the sentiments of that community? Why do these ‘seculars’ while being outraged by a verdict on the Ram Janmabhumi have nothing to say about the fact that some 40,000 places of worship of the Indian civilisation are believed to have been destroyed by Mughal lunatics, despots, mass murderers and rapists? Why do people who go about singing about ‘Akbar the Great’ also not talk about who those hordes went about destroying Hindu temples? Because it does not make for good coffee table–or bar stool for that matter–talk?

Ours is not a civilisation that went (or goes about) fighting jihads and crusades, this is not a civilisation that has heads of religion talking about ‘Asian harvests’, this is a civilisation that has given birth to religions and has opened its doors to religions of the world, something that not many nations have done, or can even imagine doing!

Closer home, in a now divided and redivided Oxom, the Oxomiyas and many of their neighbours fought against illegals from Bangladesh as Oxomiyas and their own communities and got thrashed, they tried fighting as Indians and again got thrashed (the ‘Northeastern, chinky, militant, anti-national’ factor having kicked in then) so now the Oxomiyas turn saffron and fight for the same issues, and the ‘seculars’ have a problem? Question is did the Oxomiyas not give the other parties a fair chance, for decades, only to get that thrashing? Where were the ‘seculars’ then?

Truth is for the Oxomiyas, things have slowly begun to move in the direction that have waited for for so many decades. And out comes the ‘secular human rights and religious rights’ lobby that will slam Oxom for having voted saffron–and marrying frogs in a dry spell.

Here is the bit that that lot seems to be blind to: that while they go about preaching their supposedly secular sermons, just about every second little gully in Oxom is named after a ‘Swahid’ who died fighting for the rights, sheer existence, and wellbeing of the Oxomiya, the benefits of which the self-proclaimed ‘seculars’ too will rather shamelessly partake, but without of course a simple thank you. Add to those who then died by the gun and the people who were killed in reprisals by people in uniform and that number will always, forever, outnumber the pseudo-secular lot a million to one, every time, everywhere. And those were real lives, not loose talk from a bunch of rootless clowns who are ashamed of being who they are.

Is that arithmetic so difficult to get?